Several weeks ago I was standing on a street corner in New York. (This is not the sentence I thought I'd start this post with, but go with me ...) After unsuccessfully trying to hail a cab, I decided to try out an app I had heard about called Uber. I had heard it was useful for those kinds of situations. From the moment of signup - a process which took way less time than I expected, to the actual act of immediately booking a car and heading happily on my way to LaGuardia Airport just 15 minutes later - the experience transformed my NY trip. Experience itself is getting lots of great media attention for solving a big problem in the taxicab experience - but what was particularly interesting for me, of course, was the marketing lessons their successful experience can offer. Here are five big lessons you can learn from Uber:
Simplify mobile signups. I hardly ever sign up for any kind of service on my phone, because typing on a touch screen is such a pain. Unfortunately, when signing up for Uber, I was literally standing on a street corner and had no choice. The app seemed to be designed for exactly that. They only captured the most important and basic details, and let me take a photo of my credit card to scan in the number (instead of having to type it). Every app and signup process should do this one simple thing.
Add fun to necessary waiting. After I requested a pickup, the app confirmed that I had a driver ... but it didn't stop there. As I was waiting, the app showed a Google map image of where I was and where my car was. Then I could track my car's progress in real time as it drove to meet me. Sure I was checking email and Twitter while waiting, but it was actually fun (yes fun!) to watch that car coming closer and closer until it arrived exactly as the map predicted. No empty hoping that every next car would be mine. The entire experience was stress free.
Give people useful data they didn't ask for. After my trip, I received an email with my final total cost for the trip and a receipt. This was what I expected. What I didn't expect was that they also told me exactly how long my journey had taken, how many miles we traveled (which is how they calculate the fare) and what the average speed was that whole time. I definitely didn't need that information, but somehow I was still glad to have it.
Make rating a two way street. When your journey finishes, you have the chance to rate your driver - which is nice. What you don't expect is that your driver also has a chance to rate you. So now karma has a real rating system, and it penalizes you for being an a-hole to your driver, if you happen to be that kind of person. That's how the world should work, and people should get rewarded or penalized for how they treat other people, so I love this. Not to mention that it finally gives drivers some way to be part of that rating conversation as well.
Don't apologize for excluding some people. The app has been criticized for its focus on urban city dwellers and price point that makes it about 50% more expensive than taxis, if not more. But this criticism also means that they have a clear picture of who their target audience is ... a consumer who doesn't mind paying more for the reliability and comfort of a clean black sedan that shows up exactly when you expect it.
All of these together make Uber probably my favourite new app ... and marketing story to offer lessons to each of us no matter what we are trying to promote.
The idea that Facebook causes jealousy isn't new. A study back in 2009 essentially demonstrated that romantic relationships were often suffering from jealousy induced by Facebook. The same study is still being referenced today. Unfortunately, there are a few signs that this is becoming a much bigger trend than something driven by the insecurity of dating.
For the first time in human history, there is a place where any of us can go to be surrounded by only good news. Despite the troubles in the world, or your personal struggles - Facebook offers a nearly pain free bubble. Every status update is filled with friends getting married, colleagues finding their dream job, kids getting a new puppy and people sharing their vacation in real time. After all, how many people really share moments of desperation or loneliness, or just the ordinariness of their lives on Facebook?
In a world where we are only a few characters away from instantly experiencing the best moments in the lives of everyone around us, the bad news is that it makes us even more conscious of the normal and not-particularly-shareworthy times in our own lives. It leads to a new kind of voluntary social media jealousy. We start spending hours obsessing over what others are doing and comparing it endlessly to our own lives. How many times a day do you check your Klout score? What about waiting for Google Alerts with your name? Or your blog ranking?
Greensurfing is a term to describe the time that many people choose to spend online "surfing" websites, social networks and conversations that cause them to feel more jealousy towards others for doing the things they wish they were (or could be) doing.
There are at 3 big reasons why I think this is becoming such a big behavioural trend:
Rankings are everywhere. No matter what you do online, there are plenty of free services to rank everything from your influence to your relative level of hotness. You are always being measured - just seconds away from someone slapping a rank or number on your back to define you.
People share good news more often. The simple face of social media is that people tend to share the good more often than the bad - so you end up with a warped sense of reality if you believe that people's lives are only as positive and happy as they share on Facebook.
Real time updates make it addictive. When your score or what people share is updated in real time, it makes watching the flow an addictive process. When the mobile phone chimes with a new update, you can't help but check it.
The biggest reason I thought about writing this post is that I am about to enter a greensurfing moment of my own - with my new book finally launching I know it will be hard for me to resist checking my Amazon Sales Rank constantly over the next several weeks. It is the ultimate comparison of your book (and yes, your popularity) against other Authors. And keeping it consistently high is almost impossible.
So what's my advice to conquer the impulse for greensurfing? I wish I could tell you I had the magic solution, but I don't. Awareness helps - just knowing that you are doing it can help you to change your behaviour. But at the end of the day, it doesn't have to be all bad. Check your online "score" on whatever platform matters to you. Enjoy your friends amazing life updates. But don't let your numbers define you. Klout scores are fine, just as long as they don't tempt you into to becoming a "Klouchebag."
Let me tell you a little secret. I look forward to putting together an annual trend report the same way that some people look forward to having Turkey for Thanksgiving dinner. I realize that may sound a bit strange, but ever since I did my first trend recap last year I was hooked. This year, the process of collecting the trends took all year. I have a folder on my desk labelled "Trends 2012" and throughout the year I would rip out articles from magazines or printout webpages to save. Last November I started actually writing my trend presentation and finally released it on Slideshare yesterday.
A few things surprised me about the trends this year. Here are a few of the most unexpected things:
Only 2 out of 15 trends are based on innovative technology (Trends #10 and #13). Given the prominence of technology in our lives and more and more digital tools, I expected that more of the trends for 2012 would be based entirely on technology innovation. That ended up not being the case as most of the trends focused more on either behaviours or the use of sites and technology that already exist and don't really require much innovation in order to keep growing.
Creativity and design are more important than ever. While it would have been too obvious to point this out as a trend on its own, many of the trends that were included in the presentation were highly dependent on encouraging more creativity and delivering great design. Measuring Life, for example, has taken off in part thanks to great product and interface designs. Pointillist Filmmaking or Social Artivism are clearly based on creativity and design. Even Retail Theater, Tagging Reality and Charitable Engagement are all trends that require creative thinking and strong ability to use design to engage people.
People actively seek opportunities to participate, collaborate or experience something. Doing something together came up as a big motivator for many of the trends this year, as Social Loneliness led people to look for more opportunities to have great experiences or be part of something worthwhile. Pointillist Filmmaking, Civic Engagement 2.0 and Retail Theater are all examples where people are seeking the chance to participate in something. Charitable Engagement ChangeSourcing and Co-Curation are other trends where people offer their time and passions to collaborate together on something.
Let me know what you think about these trends with a comment here or on Facebook, or feel free to send me an email at influentialmarketing@gmail.com. Next week I'll be starting my trend folder to gather stories for 2013 ...
Yesterday I spent the day at the Corporate Social Media Summit, a big gathering of some of the best minds in leading social media efforts on behalf of large corporate brands. The event was put on by the team at Useful Social Media - and that indeed was the theme of the day as panelists offered real case studies, answered tough questions and generally demonstrated that there is real hope for large corporate brands to actively use social media to generate real business value in multiple ways. Here are some of the biggest lessons that 10 brands featured on Day 1 of the event shared in their presentations:
1. American Express* - "Altruism has a long tail."
Uniquely qualified to talk about the impact of altruism, American Express Open Forum VP of Social Media Laura Fink went behind the scenes of the hugely successful "Small Business Saturday" campaign that American Express launched back in November of 2010 to create a day where consumers could get rewarded with a $25 statement credit for shopping at a small business location. According to Fink, the campaign engaged more than 1.2 million small businesses around the country and also helped those businesses to see a 28% sales lift on the day of the promotion. Perhaps more importantly, it showed that doing something good can generate a real business impact for customers as well as for the big brand putting on the campaign.
2. Union Pacific - "Never underestimate local communities."
One of the largest railway companies in the United States, Union Pacific has also been around for nearly 150 years. To celebrate this heritage, Senior Manager of Media Technology Tim Mcmahan shared a case study of a crowdsourced competition that Union Pacific held to get people to vote on the ideal route for one of their old steam engines to take on the "Union Pacific Great Excursion Adventure." The voting was split into several rounds, with some fierce competition from unexpected locations. Through each round, Mcmahon shared that the consistently surprising result was that smaller towns like Tuscola, IL were routinely outpacing big metro markets like Chicago. The point, he noted, was that sometimes the most passion for a campaign like this can come from smaller local communities for whom winning may be a bigger deal. Across the campaign, there were nearly 200,000 votes recorded, over 100,000 email addresses captured and the brand plans to reprise the campaign next year.
3. Coca-Cola* - "The most important number in social media is 360."
Through the brilliant video below, Coke's Director of Digital Communications Ashley Brown told the story of a big ambitious PR idea which turned into the largest social media campaign the brand had ever done. The mission was to send three lucky travelers on a journey to all 206 countries around the world where Coke was sold. The trio embarked on their journey on January 1, 2010 and anyone could choose to follow their travels and adventures on the website Expedition 206 (which sadly doesn't seem to be available online anymore). Their goal in each country was to find what made people happy - which Brown noted was perfectly on strategy for Coke to build on their existing brand platform and marketing campaign centered around the idea to "open happiness." The answers they got ranged from family to music to dancing to soccer (yes, they made it to the World Cup in South Africa). Through the lens of this beautiful social experiment disguised as marketing, the team managed to reach what may be the most profound conclusion of all ... that happiness is always simple, whatever form it takes.
4. Best Buy - "Nobody owns social media."
In one of the most eye-opening talks of the day, Gina Debogovich shared some big lessons learned from her time over the last 3-4 years building up the Best Buy customer service and social care center to what is now called the "Twelp Force. As a former customer care person herself, she talked about how Best Buy uses the overarching mission of "creating meaningful communications in the virtual world" to guide all of their efforts. They have an inner circle of about 26 team members dedicated to social media at their team, and then an extended 3000 employees who are actively encouraged to use social media and offered lots of different forms of training on how to do it. Her team is a resource that individual stores can use for advice on such tasks as how to effectively use Facebook specifically for their store. In addition, their team is the only customer care team in the world who currently has their own production studio for creating content such as their Best Buy Unboxing feature. In one case, Gina shared the unheard of stat of how they managed to reduce the volume of one "call driver" (customer service lingo for a top reason that people call a contact center) by 50% simply by producing a video to answer that question.
Disclaimer: I moderated this panel where Gina spoke.
5. Samsung - "Negative experiences are our biggest opportunity."
Samsung is a brand that has made lots of strides recently in integrating social media into their customer service, and has been very active in joining conversations about their brand online. One of the leaders of this, Jessica Kalbarczyk (@samsungjessica) shared her insights about how her small team of four colleagues manages to engage people online about Samsung, and help solve their problems. For Jessica, coming from a marketing and PR role into one more focused on customer service was a fulfilling role because every day she manages to address real problems and change consumers experiences one by one. Anyone in a marketing role who has suffered through never ending meetings about social media without a real vision or tangible outcome will easily be able to imagine how nice a feeling it much be to actually solve real problems and the sense of accomplishment that would offer on a daily basis. As part of that, she shared a point of view which is common among customer service pros ... that they would much rather find negativity and have a chance to fix it and change that consumer's perception. Marketers, on the other hand, tend to run scared in the opposite direction from any negativity. There is clearly a lesson here about the necessity of integrating marketing and customer service more closely.
Disclaimer: I moderated this panel where Jessica spoke.
6. Dell - "Forget ROI and focus more broadly on business value."
At the top of most analyst's lists of brands that have managed to integrate social media into their operations in a real and tangible way would likely be computer maker Dell. During his talk, Richard Binhammer from Dell shared a historical perspective of how social media became integrated into the organization, and one of the most powerful points in his presentation was where he shared the six business areas which have fully embraced social media for different business reasons - marketing, product development, sales, online presence, customer service and communications. While other brands focus on one of these at a time, Dell has reached a point where they can "inhale and exhale at the same time" as Richard shared in his talk. Ultimately, his biggest point is that "ROI" is such a restricting term when it comes to describing what social media can offer and there is a much stronger way to describe the real value behind it that we need to think about including in more of our discussions.
Disclaimer: I moderated this panel where Richard spoke.
7. Southwest - "Have fun and be human."
Fun and airline are not two words that anyone would typically use in the same sentence, yet Social Media Manager from Southwest Airlines Alice Wilson devoted a good part of her talk about how Southwest creates a more human brand by using an irreverant voice. The questions that keep many other large brands up at night in terms of making sure they have backup for employees who are running social media channels, or mapping everything back to some specific campaign or column on a spreadsheet don't seem to matter as much for Southwest. They have guiding principles around their social voice, yet Alice shares that most people who speak out for the brand "just get the hang of it." Without that formalized training or overly bureaucratic approach to managing every aspect of Southwest, the brand succeeds because they have such a strong culture that people start to take it on as their own from day one and this translates into social media.
Disclaimer: I moderated this panel where Alice spoke.
8. Kodak - "Real time listening pays off."
Kodak is a brand that has won a lot of respect for how forward thinking they have been in moving into social media over the past several years, even publishing a guidebook which was available for the attendees on how to use social media and what they had learned. In his talk Tom Hoen, the Kodak Director of Interactive Marketing, shared a number of examples demonstrating the power of listening. In one example, the brand awoke to a barrage of negativity from fans of a Nickelodeon TV show called Degrassi because there was a rumor that the brand had pulled all their advertising due to the show's sometimes adult themes. Fairly rapidly, they were able to use social media to diffuse the rumor (it was actually just a natural pause in flighting for their ads) and engage those angry voices - leading one person to share on Twitter "Now I feel bad. I told the Kodak people to eff themselves sideways, and they sent me a tweet being all nice." Aside from the newly found good feelings, Degrassi and Nickelodeon offered up 2 free spots to Kodak during their season premiere. Not a bad ROI for engaging a few irate teens.
9. New York Life - "Brands need to trust their people."
An unexpected voice at the event came from Gregory Weiss, the AVP of Social Media for New York Life. He started with an entertaining look at the hypcritical nature of business, and how many large brands are afraid of what their employees might do with social media even though they let those same employees have phones and use fax machines and talk to people outside of the company. His main point was that if you can't trust your employees to do the right things and make the right choices, then maybe you need to hire better people. He offered several real tips for using social media in a corporate environment, including supporting your existing sales force, getting on the agenda of new hire initiations so you can tell them about social media, and even simple things like encouraging people to add your social media properties to the end of their email signatures. A point I took away as well, though he didn't mention it was about the importance of picking your battles. Apparently, New York Life also has a vetting process they use internally before any social media property can link to an outside website. That might seem like overkill for many brands, but Greg manages to work around it without making it a big issue.
10. Pepsi - "Reward people for everyday behaviour."
The last presentation of the day came from Josh Karpf, who focuses on an area that more brands should consider having as part of their marketing efforts ... digital research and development. His group runs many forward thinking experiments on how to use social media to engage consumers, and he shared some real examples and hard data from a few of their efforts around trying to offer couponing as a layer on top of geolocation and encouraging people to check in. For one campaign with Hess convenience stores, they found that using a Foursquare promotion in a particular location offered a 47% boost in volume of purchase over previous weeks where the campaign was not running - a great result for the retailer. On the Pepsi side, they interesting learned that coupon redemptions were much higher when offered to people as a reward for some type of behaviour, which seems to offer the logical conclusion that people are more likely to follow through a claim the discount or product from a coupon if they feel they had to "earn" that coupon in some way such as by checking into the gym for 10 days in a month.
*NOTE: Several of the brands mentioned in this post are current or previous Ogilvy clients. In particular, Coca-Cola and American Express are both clients and some Ogilvy team members may have worked on both of the campaigns mentioned. In both cases, I did not work in either campaign and also have not been compensated or encouraged in any way to write about these two brands or these campaigns. I am also a contributor to the American Express Open Forum website.
One of the topics that has gotten a lot of attention from forward thinking marketers in the last year is the potential for geolocation and geosocial marketing. This year, there will be more devices with built in GPS and the ability to geotag content you create with the location where you created it than ever before. Location Based Services (LBS) like FourSquare and Gowalla are increasing their number of users who use the services to "check in" to locations like hotels and restaurants. Even the backend technology of the Internet is cooperating, as marketers have access to originating IP addresses and access points to understand where a web browser is sitting physically.
Whether this locational information is user contributed or automatically generated, the fact is that many feel 2011 will be the year that geolocation finally emerges as an opportunity that anyone in marketing won't be able to ignore. Whether you have already tried some marketing efforts in this space, or whether you are considering it in the near future - this post rounds up some of the biggest opportunities when it comes to geolocation and offers a few ideas for how you might get started.
1. Creating Geotagged Content Mashups One of the biggest concerns with geolocation marketing is always around the privacy of consumers and the potential for brands to be seen as "cyber stalkers" for pushing messages that chase consumers around. The nice thing about geotagging, however, is that there are millions of pieces of content online right now which feature geolocation information attached to them. Images are tagged with the exact GPS coordinates of where they were taken. Video can be linked to specific dates and events based on the meta data uploaded. This is offering a great curation opportunity for brands who take this content and create interesting visualizations around it.
Example: Grey Canada's recently released "Global Mood Clock"
2. Offering Exclusive Experiences & Discounts Via Location Based Services Foursquare and Gowalla are both actively courting businesses to advertise with them. Gowalla recently created a partnership with Disney Theme Parks and Foursquare had a highly debated large promotion with McDonald's as well as an interesting promotion in the UK with Domino's. Each were examples of these Location Based Services using their platforms to offer a layer for brands to buy into for the purpose of promoting special or exclusive offers to those customers who willingly broadcast their locations to their social networks. Moving forward, new services like SCVNGR which focus more on the gaming appeal of checking into locations are starting to offer another way for brands to reach niche audiences of LBS users.
Example: Foursquare with Domino's in the UK.
3. Serving IP-Based Location-Specific Content & Advertising If there were an "old school" aspect to geolocation marketing, this would be it. For many years now, brands have had the ability to target people based on the location of the IP address from which they were accessing the Internet. Combined with user generated data such as users sharing their location on social networks or adding location details to their personal profiles, this is opening up opportunities for brands to share specific content and advertising messages with people based just on where they happen to be at any particular time.
4. Augmenting Live Events This may be the most obvious yet clearly underutilized opportunity for geolocation marketing. Whether looking at a large scale sporting event in a big stadium, or a company sponsored customer conference, there are potential ways for geolocation marketing to be used at the event. This could include special offers for individuals who visit a trade show booth or promoting future events to current attendees based on the assumption that people who attend one event may be more likely to consider attending another. Add in the potential for people to connect with others in their social network who happen to be at the same event, and the benefits of encouraging people to create and share content from events to promote the event to those who are not in attendance and you begin to see the potential here.
Example: New Jersey Nets Gowalla Partnership
5. Organizing Change & Social Good In the social realm, we have already seen the power of geolocation in revolutionary situations such as the recent events in Tunisia where citizens have used the power of geolocation to organize together to promote a shared point of view. Outside of politics, geolocation can be used to find green businesses through apps like Greenopia and also to join social movements and real events organized to promote specific causes. One service, CauseWorld, is creating an entire model based on geolocation for you to generate positive results based on socially motivated behaviours.
Example: CauseWorld
List Of Additional Useful Articles About Geolocation:
Getting to my hotel tonight, I checked out TweetDeck to see an endless stream of #CES tweets coming through from people at the event as well as those thinking about it. If you are an active user of Twitter - you will probably be unable to avoid this barrage of 140 character updates for the next few days. To help keep you sane - or give you a guide to tweeting if you happen to be at CES, here is my list of the ten types of tweets you will see people using based on a very careful and scientific observation of Twitter for approximately 17 minutes this evening (equalling approximately 200 tweets).*
#1 - The Bait & Switch "I spoke with [company name] and saw [product/technology name] (and tweeted about it so now I don't have to write about it)." #noteverythingisnewsworthy
#2 - The Tall Poppy "I am at [party name]/I met [almost celebrity name] - OMG, aren't you jealous that you aren't me?" #whocaresiftheyrememberme
#3 - The Badge Beggar "I checked in at [random location or booth], please give me a Foursquare Badge or free stuff." #iseekvalidation
#4 - The Morning Bitch I can't believe I had to wake up at [ungodly hour] to work/attend [event name]. #needcoffee
#5 - The Promoter "Please read/retweet my tremendously insightful blog/video/podcast from CES - [link goes here]" #ces
#6 - The Tablet/3DTV Bandwagon "I reviewed/saw/smelled/sat next to the latest tablet/3DTV from [manufacturer] and it is life altering." #spreadthehype
#7 - The Booth Pimp "Come to our booth and see our game changing/revolutionary/disease curing technology." #itweetformoney
#8 - The Apple Evangelizer "Who cares about CES? Apple will tell us what to love in a few weeks at Macworld." #jobsismymessiah
#9 - The Evening Bitch "I can't believe I worked [ungodly number of hours] today. I'm going to bed." #hopemybossreadsthis
#10 - The Porn Mention "I saw a porn star's boobs/cleavage/short skirt. Isn't it clever they have their show at the same time as CES in Vegas?" #whathappensinvegas
If you're here or paying attention, which great tweet categories did I miss? Just a fair warning ... I will do my best to have at least one tweet from each of these categories over the rest of the week. [Kidding!]
*Note - Sadly, this post is only partially a joke (if you follow the #CES hashtag any day this week, you'll see what I mean)
BTW - Please retweet this. Only 9 more types to go!
Last week on December 1st to support World AIDS Day, a small group of celebrities with millions of fans led by Alicia Keyes decided to sacrifice their digital lives to try and save real ones. The campaign, cleverly called "Digital Death" was supported by posters, online ads and a well branded microsite. The premise was simple: a group of celebrities forego using Twitter or Facebook until $1,000,000 in donations are raised for their cause. Anyone involved with the idea might have guessed that this would last for a day or two before the target was met. It has been five days and the donations still haven't even hit $300,000.
This idea isn't bad. The celebrity support is top notch. And the branding is really strong. So why did a campaign like this which has all the individual pieces it should need for success fall flat? Here are a few reasons:
Inherently egotistical idea. The premise of this entire campaign was built on what is a fairly egotistical idea: that fans care so much about the tweets of their favourite celebrities that they would be willing to donate money to a cause in order to get them back. For core fans - this premise likely holds true ... but there are likely many fans of the celebrities who just don't care THAT much.
Asking for too much. When I first saw this campaign last week, they had a minimum donation of $10. Immediately that struck me as a huge strategic mistake. Currently it has been reduced to $1, but this choice likely cost them many supporters who might have given a buck or two at the beginning of the campaign when the buzz was highest, but would never give $10. Even the American Red Cross raising money after the Haiti earthquake had a minimum of $5. The initial minimum of $10 was a big hurdle, and even though they corrected it - it likely was too late.
Unclear connection to cause. The campaign was understandable for what the celebrities were doing, but the connection between stopping the use (or overuse) of social media and helping keep kids fighting AIDS alive was a very thin one. The best campaigns are ones where the themes work together, and in this case they didn't.
Going against cultural trends. There is a big cultural trend today towards feeling overloaded. People are bombarded with marketing messages, tweets, updates, followers and friends. Most of us just want a bit more simplicity, so when a group of relatively prolific celebrity Twitter users decide to "go dark" - more than a few fans likely breathed a sigh of relief. For those folks, paying to bring back the noise would be like writing a check to someone to punch you in the nose. The money might go to a great cause, but I still like my nose too much for that.
How could this campaign have worked and still made a big impact? One core thing I would have changed is to use the power of all these celebrities Twitter accounts for something more than silence. What if they all chose to spend 24 or 48 hours ONLY tweeting about Keep A Child Alive? Or how about donating some of their own money for everyone who asks them to stop their digital death?
This campaign had a chance to be something great - but now the only thing left for us to see is how the celebrities participating will come "back to life" online and quietly leave this behind them.
Update #2 12/6/10 9:02pm - Looks like the campaign miraculously went viral and raised over $700k in less than 24 hours so they are now at over $1 million raised. Either that or some of the celebs put up some cash to get their own digital lives back.
This week Twitter finally shared a business model that introduces the idea of promoted tweets as a way for organizations to pay for branded tweets to appear in search results much as paid results appear on any Google search. It's a simple and relatively conservative first step and though some people may have cried foul or accused Twitter of "selling out" - my sense is that the fallout will not lead to any significant drop in usage for Twitter.
The bigger question is what does this mean for where Twitter is heading? The fear that some users have is that this is only the first step in a progression for Twitter, an opinion that seems to be supported by the blog post on the Twitter Blog yesterday which referred to this move as "Phase I." To help understand what this might mean for the future of Twitter, I did a bit of thinking on why this move happened today, why it matters for marketers, what the potential issues might be, and where it might lead Twitter in the future.
Why Will Marketers Be Willing To Pay For Advertising On Twitter?
The first question you might ask is whether organizations will even be willing to pay for advertising on Twitter in the same way that they currently pay to show ads in search results on Google. I think that they will because ...
People who are already used to getting paid to endorse products, services or ideas (ie - Celebs & the Internet-famous) are actively using Twitter and increasingly expect to be able to monetize their voices as they can in other media.
Twitter is great for driving traffic, the one thing many marketers care most about, because links are front and center and often you NEED to click a link to get the real context behind the soundbite/headline shared in 140 characters.
There are two relatively simple and basic built-in metrics to Twitter (number of followers and number of clicks on a link) - which makes measurement very straightforward and uncomplicated for most marketers.
As more and more brands create corporate and branded Twitter accounts, pressure and desire to grow their own followings will increase - which means they will seek more ways to build their branded followers on Twitter.
What Are The Real Potential Issues With Marketing On Twitter?
The concern for Twitter "selling out" isn't a big deal in my mind. No one who stops using Twitter for this reason really matters to the ecosystem of marketing or to the site anyway. The real concern is one of disclosure and ethics. In particular the following issues:
There is no recognized standard for disclosure in tweets. Some tweets include the hashtag "#spon" which stands for "sponsored" and would make no sense to someone unfamiliar with the lingo.
Disclosure and transparency will always be hard in 140 characters. The challenge of proper disclosure often comes down to the simple limitation of space. Often you just can't fit a message that makes sense, and the right disclosure to be ethical within 140 characters.
Any disclosures are often lost in retweets. The ecosystem of retweets are primarily how a message spreads across Twitter to reach many people and even become a trending topic. The problem with retweets is that often for space limitations or other reasons the disclosure that may have been included in an original tweets is stripped out of the retweets so very rapidly a message loses any sort of transparency of bias that it may have originally contained.
What Will Twitter's Business Model Phase II And Beyond Look Like?
This is probably the toughest question to answer, but if I were helping the site to identify this, I would focus on three core areas (the first of which they have already started with their recent announcement for the promoted tweets):
Sponsored Search Results. Twitter search is rapidly becoming a utility used by some as frequently as Google search. Putting into place a model that duplicates much of the functionality of Google's AdWords program is the simplest place to start. People are already familiar with this model as well as the idea that there is a combination of organic search results (those that appear based on algorithms) and paid search results (those that appear as a result of an organization paying for their placement). I expect to see their sponsored tweet program evolve in a similar way to how Google has evolved Adwords - even down to the local focus through geotagging tweets and messages.
Paid Registration & Account Verification. Due to increasing fraud, Twitter began verifying accounts of the famous and semi-famous. Now that mark of "verified" has become something of a badge of honor - indicating that you are important enough to be verified by Twitter. There is a long waiting list to get accounts verified and an obvious choice seems to be to make this into a paid subscription service. The option to have a free account on Twitter will continue to exist, but for those who use Twitter for professional reasons, there should be a paid option as well. For paying a monthly or annual fee, you have your account professional verified and perhaps the ability to appear more highly on certain types of search results as well. A cross between registering your domain name and a Pro account on Flickr, this option would likely be chosen by hundreds of thousands of "power users" of Twitter - including myself.
Sponsored Influencer Tweets. The most contentious move to monetize Twitter would likely come from having a model where individuals would be paid for what they tweet about and organizations would be able to pay a fee to sponsor individual tweets. This model already exists through several services, including Ad.ly. The simplest way for Twitter to add this functionality would be to acquire Ad.ly and roll their model and services into Twitter. Ultimately, this move will come down to a timing issue, as I believe it will happen after the first two changes are already implemented.
There is a fundamental problem among social media experts today. Some people have argued that the problem lies with people who are rushing to call themselves an expert without having the necessary experience. Others create some sort of artificial metric to try and put some parameters around who should be allowed to call themselves an expert and who should not. The easier way out (which I myself have taken on occasion) is to excuse yourself from the entire debate by saying that no one is REALLY an expert and we are all just people who use these tools and try our best. Since coming back from SXSW, I have been thinking about this and realized that none of these methods really works because they all assume that a "social media expert" is a single type of person.
To be sure, there are some people working in social media who really shouldn't be - but I don't believe this number is as high as others would say. Instead, I think that many people who could be great at certain roles are simply trying to fill the wrong role. So, to help, I thought I would share what I think the 9 types of social media experts really are. And in true social media fashion, since 9 is such an uneven number ... let me know what you think the 10th would be. I will add the best suggestion for a 10th to this list.Thanks to all the great suggestions, I have added 3 more types of Social Media Experts to this post and updated the title to share 12 instead of 9 types. Thanks for all the great comments!
The Pretender - This is the person who everyone loves to hate. The newly arrived and minted "expert" who has barely used any tools beyond Facebook and Twitter, has hardly any friends or followers, and bases most of their thinking on what they just read from the dozen or so social media "gurus" who frequently share free advice on their blogs.
The Trainer/Teacher - Being a great teacher is a gift, and not many people truly have it. If you are a natural trainer or teacher, you have the ability to make complex ideas that are part of social media easy to understand. After listening to your direction, someone new to using the tools and thinking about social media will feel dramatically more comfortable using the tools and (most importantly) why they should even bother.
The Professional Speaker - Popular sentiment is to treat these people as the biggest blowhards in the industry because they get up on stage and get paid to talk about social media. It is the existence of this type of expert, however, that often creates the inspiration and excitement about social media as a whole. Once again, not everyone is necessarily good at taking this role - but listening to a great speaker about social media can create a real impact across the entire industry. Speakers may be the rising tide that can lift everyone else's boats.
The Content Curator - I have blogged at length about how I believe content curators will be among one of the most important social media jobs of the future. While some may equate the job to that of a digitally savvy librarian, I see the role of a curator as much more of an editor about a particular topic. The curators are the ones that can help us make sense of the exploding amount of content online. The almighty search algorithm won't be enough.
The Event Organizer - In social media, there are lots of great events. From the more official conferences and summits to the less formal meetups and tweetups. If your gift is in creating really engaging moments for people to gather in real life and to facilitate those moments, you might fit this category. The Event Organizer, too, is vital for the social media industry to thrive because they are the ones that drive the real moments where virtual relationships become real.
The Community Manager - Having a great community manager may be one of the most difficult roles to fill on a digital team, because the skill set can be quite elusive. A great community manager is dealing with real conversations in real time and reacting to those conversations transparently. If you happen to have these skills and use them well, you could easily grow into the very center of an organization's entire social media efforts (a great place to be).
The Content Creator - This is one of the most public types of social media experts because their expertise is on display consistently. Content creators are great at writing thoughts in blog posts, sharing their every thought via Twitter, or creating video. In the right role, content creators can become indispensible assets to a team and generate highly original content to engage an audience.
The Marketing Strategist - If I have one intention with this post, it is to point out very distinctly that not every social media expert should automatically be put into this category. If you are a marketing strategist, you know the best way to use social media to achieve a marketing objective such as promoting a product or service. You don't blindly create a "platform" for a client with every social media tool, or consider "start by listening and then engage people in a conversation" actionable strategic advice. Instead, you are able to solve a real business problem with a smart plan for using social media, and entirely capable of admitting which business problems social media may not be the best solution for.
The Designer/Builder - In some ways, this is the most important type of social media expert - because these are actually the people who make real solutions. Strategy is great, but at some point you need a real execution plan and these are the experts who can get it done. More importantly, they will also be able to provide advice based on experience for how you may want to implement your plans, and what strategy or tactics you may want to stay away from.
The Networker/Connector [Added 03/24] - This additional category, suggested by several commenters, is the person who actively uses social media to make connections with people both online and offline. In some cases these individuals may be HR professionals, but in most instances they are simply people who actively believe in being social online and use their connections to introduce people to one another. In the best case they are the ones that enable real connections between people - but in the worst case they can also be shameless self-promoters. (Suggested by Maxiosearch, Ann Marie van den Hurk, APR)
The Evangelist [Added 03/24] - Often in the role of speaking for a brand and putting a human face on an organization, the Evangelist is the person who uses social media to promote a belief, product or organization. For this individual, social media is a way to share content and engage in conversations about something they are passionate about. As some readers pointed out, this could also be someone who preaches the use of social media internally within an organization. (Suggested by Phil Simon, Ingrid Hein, Russell Pearson)
The Entrepreneur[Added 03/24] - One category that several readers alluded to but no one specifically suggested was the category of innovator or entrepreneur. This is the person who sees everything in social media and decides that their expertise is in creating a new tool or platform to share with the world. The creators of popular services like Foursquare or Twitter might fall into this category, as well as anyone who has ever launched a new service or app to solve a particular need or desire. Entrepreneurs are the ones who use their expertise to create something new in social media and drive innovation.
You might be tempted to read into this post that there are certain types of experts that are more valid than any others, but except for the first type I strongly believe that each has an important role to play as organizations and businesses of all sizes get smarter about how and when to use social media. If you work in the industry or interact with those who do - my simple plea is that we all need to get better about understanding which of these roles we are particularly good at and focus on that. As a whole I can think of nothing better to help legitimize and grow the entire area of social media and the groups who are able to benefit from using it well.
Let me go on the record to say that if you happen to be a vendor of some type of social networking solution or software that would be useful for an agency like Ogilvy, hands down one of your most effective methods of advertising has to be to target the Ogilvy network on Facebook with a customized ad. I have seen several ads like this for solutions and find myself always clicking on them - not because they say Ogilvy but because I presume that someone has done their homework and identified that whatever they are promoting is particularly relevant for someone who works at an agency like ours. So I'll give the the benefit of the doubt and click further. That's how I found Twiangulate.
Though I could just as easily have gotten an email from Henry about it, the fact that the ads were properly targeted already tells you something about the thinking about creating and promoting the site. Recently a few influential folks whose opinions I respect, like Sree Sreenivasan also profiled the site and talked about their own experience of finding it highly useful. So that initial ad coupled with the validation that comes from seeing someone in my network using it was enough to get me to try the site ... and now I'm hooked. I've tried lots of similar Twitter-Finding-Following-Ranking type applications. They always seem to spit out a number or list at the end with relatively little context and everything is ranked by volume. More Twitter followers equals a higher influence in general.
Twiangulate (a brilliantly named site) is from the folks behind BlogAds, and features similar smarts to help make simple sense of a big problem ... who you should actually care about reading on Twitter. It's not a sexy site, just as BlogAds isn't - but there are at least three reasons why you'll love Twiangulate:
Uses the most common sense metric for influence. In life, as the saying goes, it's not who you know but who knows you. Twiangulate uses this principle to help you find out how influential someone's follower base is. If they command a large number of followers who have high influence, chances are they will to. This is a page from Google's book about how they rank web pages as well, but for some reason has been notably missing from many Twitter apps designed to help judge influence.
Designed to spotlight intersections. It's not hard to find a list of the top marketers on Twitter, or the top fashion bloggers, but it can be tough to narrow down the list of bloggers who also talk often about fashion. You can do it with Twiangulate if can find one Twitter username for each category and then just highlight the people they commonly follow. Finally you have a way to find new people on Twitter that doesn't rely either on their username or them putting an accurate description into their bio.
Lets you focus on the small too. As Sree noted in his piece, there is much insight you can gain by looking at the opposite end of the spectrum for Twitter followers ... who are the followers with the lowest influence that those with the highest follow. This method would likely help you uncover people like Kim Kardashian's aunt, who have relatively small accounts but may be important to the influencers you might be interested in reaching as a marketer.
Chances are I'll uncover a few more interesting ways that the site could be used to help find the most interesting and influential people to pay attention to on Twitter. In the meantime, good luck doing your own twiangulating!
Rohit works at Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, part of WPP - a world leader in advertising and marketing services. The views expressed on this blog are his personal opinion and do not necessarily reflect the views of his employer or its clients.
Add fun to necessary waiting. After I requested a pickup, the app confirmed that I had a driver ... but it didn't stop there. As I was waiting, the app showed a Google map image of where I was and where my car was. Then I could track my car's progress in real time as it drove to meet me. Sure I was checking email and Twitter while waiting, but it was actually fun (yes fun!) to watch that car coming closer and closer until it arrived exactly as the map predicted. No empty hoping that every next car would be mine. The entire experience was stress free.
